SNEAK PEEK
|
Saturday, June 10th
Her shoulders were wetly beaded in the waning daylight. Her stringy hair clung to her face as she leaned away, cringing with an ear-to-ear grin as another soaking blast pistoled against her neck. Her hands raised, palms out. A useless defense. Biting her lip playfully, peeking through her dripping fingers, she ducked and twisted, turned her back to the relentless barrage of water sport and let out a delightfully pained shriek as cold water traced the curve of her hip, along her back, up the nape of her neck. She laughed and the sound touched Ruby Holloway’s ears like vice. Gazing from one backyard into the next over a waist-high fence—which left much to be desired in the way of privacy—Ruby squinted as sunlight sparked in the sprinkler stream next door. Not realizing she was smiling, she remembered herself as her husband’s voice inquired something beside her. “Huh?” “We’re going back inside,” Jake repeated, smiling. Tracing his wife’s daydream curiously, he eyed the neighboring yard where a nameless young mother waged a cold, sopping water war with her children. “You coming?” The realtor—a short, plump older woman whose friendly eyes were always half-lidded due to the amount of makeup weighing them down—shut the door behind them as they returned inside the empty house for the final time. “What are your thoughts?” the realtor asked Ruby, leaning toward her attentively. |
“Honestly, I think it’s bigger than what we need. Better for a family, I imagine.”
“Oh?” The realtor—Cheryl was her name—looked between the young couple, those darkly shadowed eyes rapid-firing back and forth. “No plans to start one of your own, then?”
“None for us,” Jake answered, and put a thoughtful hand on the small of Ruby’s back. Taking the bullet, Ruby thought.
“Oh, now, a couple as photogenic as you! You’ll change your mind, believe me. And the world will certainly be prettier for it.”
Cheryl looked slyly to each of their faces, on the brink of elbowing them chummily.
“Of course then I’d have to raise them,” Ruby chided. “And then let’s see how your theory holds up.”
Cheryl casually fanned the air, a gesture of dismissal to their naivety. “Well, you’re just kids yourselves. Still plenty of time. Remind me again—I know you’re moving out here for work, Mr. Holloway. What is it you do, Ruby?”
Because I don’t want children, that means I need to explain my purpose in life? Ruby thought bitterly.
“I write books.”
“Oh!” Cheryl appeared genuinely shocked, and she looked Ruby up and down as if she were a creature she’d never known existed. “Really? You’re a writer? Are you published?”
Ruby nodded. “Many times.”
“What do you write?”
“Romance,” Ruby said, grinning. “The dirty kind.”
She watched the realtor carefully then, trying to detect discomfort, an avoidance to meet Ruby’s gaze, but to Ruby’s great surprise Cheryl didn’t appear at all offended. In fact, she seemed downright impressed.
“Well!” Cheryl put a hand to her heart, head cocked curiously, taking Ruby in for the first time a second time. “That is just marvelous. You make money doing that, then?”
“Enough to support the both of us while I made a career change,” Jake interrupted. His hand was still on Ruby’s back.
Cheryl regarded them both fondly, eyes darting curiously.
“Your generation never ceases to amaze me…” Her hand on her chest found the hummingbird-shaped necklace hanging there and she played with it absentmindedly while she continued to stare, wondering things Ruby had no interest in knowing. “So a family is really out of the question? Truly?”
Ruby had to stifle a mean-spirited laugh that abruptly rose to the back of her throat. There were a million ways she might have told this woman—this Cheryl—about how none of that was any of her damn business in the first place. But the evening was only just creeping up on them and there were still a handful of houses left to view. She’d refrain from souring the rest.
“Truly.”
***
Ruby chose to sit in the backseat of Cheryl’s car on their way to the next property, Jake in the passenger seat. Several times Ruby sensed eyes on her and found the nosy realtor watching through the rearview mirror. Each time their gazes met, the realtor’s watching eyes squinted with a smile Ruby couldn’t see.
“Sorry,” Cheryl said. “I don’t mean to keep staring. It’s just…” She paused and Ruby’s hands balled themselves into fists in her lap, bracing. “Has anyone ever told you, you look like a young Ingrid Bergman?”
Jake turned in his seat to look at Ruby, brow furrowed. Ruby gave him the same look.
“I don’t know who that is,” Ruby said.
Cheryl laughed heartily. “Oh! I keep forgetting. It’s not often these days I’m showing houses to couples as young as yourselves. Remind me your ages again?”
“Twenty-five,” both Ruby and Jake answered.
“Well, anyway…” Cheryl laughed again. “Ingrid Bergman. Look her up. Either of you watch movies? Casablanca? No?”
Ruby and Jake exchanged yet another private glance.
“I know it’s famous,” Jake said. “Never seen it, though.”
Cheryl’s eyes found Ruby again in the rearview mirror, and now she studied her openly with no scruples, and Ruby fidgeted uncomfortably.
“She was beautiful,” Cheryl said. “That’s all you need to know.”
***
A comfortable silence had fallen over the car in their traveling, until the length of the silence reminded Ruby that it was strange they hadn’t reached their destination yet. Then Cheryl spoke up at last and explained the winding, prolonged nature of their journey.
“You probably noticed by now we’ve taken a bit of a detour,” she said. “There’s another house I want to show you both. I hope it’s all right. I have a good feeling about it.”
Ruby picked up the small stack of paper sitting in the backseat beside her—printouts of the listings they’d be visiting, provided by Cheryl at the start of their evening. Ruby shuffled through them carefully.
“It’s not one of these?”
“No. It isn’t one I’d planned showing you tonight.”
“Oh. All right…”
“See, I’d put together a list of houses in areas I thought suitable for a young couple such as yourselves.” Cheryl laughed again, a mechanism she must have learned that could pardon her of any blame or fault no matter the situation. Such a character, that Cheryl! “But I know now I made assumptions I shouldn’t have.”
They were driving along the suburb’s outskirts—houses to their left, and down a slight slope from the road’s shoulder on their right an old, barbed-wire fence with an expanse of field beyond it, a pasture filled with wild grass and a scattering of tall, unruly cottonwoods. Ruby watched through her window, searching the pasture for cattle, or perhaps even--
“Nearly there,” Cheryl said. “Just around the corner here.”
She pulled the wheel hand over hand as they turned onto a different street. The sign read: HARWICK LN. Only it wasn’t really a street or a lane, Ruby discovered. They entered into a cozy, spoon-shaped cul-de-sac, bordered by six houses total: four properties circling the head of the spoon, and two properties on either corner of the cul-de-sac’s narrow entrance—the stubby spoon handle. They were each in the same general style, with varying hues of clapboard siding. Cheryl followed the curve of the cul-de-sac until they arrived at the rearmost house on the cul-de-sac’s righthand side. A light blue rambler. As she pulled into the driveway, Ruby searched the yard for a sign and saw none.
“I don’t see a for-sale sign,” she said.
Cheryl parked and killed the engine, then looked toward the yard open-mouthed as if she didn’t know the first thing about that.
“Huh, that’s curious,” she said. “I’ll have to replace it.”
“I’m assuming the previous owners are gone,” Jake said. “Since we’re dropping by unannounced like this.”
“Right. No one’s in this house currently.” Cheryl unbuckled. Opening her door, she turned to them and said, “A quick tour?”
***
“It’s a little smaller, at least,” Ruby said as they entered the kitchen. She admired the clean, white-granite countertops. She leaned over the kitchen sink and peered through the window there, looking into the backyard. “Oh, those same cottonwoods along the back, and that barbed-wire fence…”
“Yes!” Cheryl brushed against Ruby as she leaned beside her, looking out. “You might have noticed the ranch we passed on our way here. All that property runs along the back here. It’s very quiet without neighbors behind you. Well, unless you count the horses.”
“Horses?” Jake’s hand found Ruby’s waist as he came to stand behind her at the sink, looking through the window over her shoulder. “You love horses.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t say I love them. I just grew up with them, is all.”
“Is that so?” Cheryl said. “Did you grow up on a ranch?”
“Kind of. I mean, it was only horses. My mom had a real passion for them.”
Cheryl wished to show them the backyard, so they stepped out and strolled across the lawn. It was more private than the last house they were shown, bordered on both sides by tall wooden fencing that ran to the yard’s end. The very rear of the yard, however, was not fenced in, unless you counted the low, barbed-wire fence separating the ranch’s property. A small toolshed stood in the far corner near the barbed-wire fence on the lefthand side. Jake pointed to it.
“That’s where we’ll build the secret underground weapons bunker.”
Ruby smiled, brow raised. “Mhmm.” She took a deep breath and admired the tops of the trees, swaying as the sky behind them was beginning to turn. “It’s peaceful, I’ll give it that.”
“Best of all,” Cheryl said, “the neighbors here are all a bit older. No children. There is one younger couple, I believe. The Porters. But they’re a bit like you. Modern, you know. Career driven. They only recently moved in themselves.”
“Did you sell them their house?” Ruby asked.
“I did. I’m actually friends with your neighbors. These ones…” She pointed to the yard left of them. “So I can at least personally assure you they’re very friendly.”
“Not too friendly, I hope,” Ruby said jokingly.
“Ruby’s the kind of neighbor who likes to keep things to a ‘courteous wave’ basis,” Jake said.
“I’m just not fond of small talk,” Ruby added.
Cheryl nodded, smiling to some private thought while she looked at Ruby in such a way that Ruby became uncomfortable and turned away, looking again to the trees gently brushing the sky.
“I understand,” Cheryl said. She clapped her hands together with a hollow smack. “Well, I’ll let you two walk around some more. Talk amongst yourselves. I need to make a quick phone call, if that’s all right. I’ll be out front in the meantime if you have any questions.”
Cheryl left them alone in the backyard. Ruby continued to look up at the sky above the trees, turning bright with sunset as the sun abandoned them. Jake stood behind her and put his hands on either of her shoulders, massaging.
“What do you think of this place?”
“It seems nice,” Ruby said. She spoke vaguely, sighing deeply. “It’s still a little big, I think.”
“Big? It’s the smallest house on the street. The others are all two-story.” Jake leaned against her, his face beside hers, and spoke into her ear. “And did you hear? No children…”
He kissed Ruby’s ear gently so as not to deafen her. Then he stepped back and took her hand in his. He started deeper into the yard, toward the trees and the barbed-wire fence and the toolshed.
“I wonder…” he said, and looked over his shoulder at Ruby with a sly glint in his eye.
“Oh, god. What are you up to?”
He led them toward the toolshed, around it. He cast an alert glance toward the back of the house before they slipped around the corner and stood in the shade between the toolshed and the trees beyond the barbed-wire fence. He pushed Ruby delicately against the shed, his hands moving about her waist.
“I take it you…” Ruby paused as he kissed her, panting. “…really like the house.”
“I love it,” he breathed.
He tucked his face into the nook of her neck and shoulder as his hands climbed from her hips, her waist, up to her breasts, then down again.
With her chin rested over Jake’s shoulder, Ruby eyed the trees, the gaps between them and their branches. The pasture of wild grass through those gaps rippled and waved with the same breeze that moved in the treetops over their heads. That peaceful, warm quiet was all around them and loud. The leaves rustled, chattering a secret language Ruby only barely understood.
As Jake’s hand slipped against her, underneath the waist of her jeans, and cupped her between her legs, Ruby closed her eyes and rested her head back against the slivery toolshed. He groped her, kissed the side of her neck. She opened her eyes a little and glimpsed the dying sunlight through the branches overhead. Warm gold.
She closed her eyes once more and imagined glowing dew on a woman’s face. The sound of contagious laughter from a pink-lipped mouth. A two-piece bathing suit. The hand inside her jeans cupped more firmly, fingers working, and Ruby breathed in sharply.
Her eyes opened into pleasant slits and looked to the spaces between the trees. There was movement. A four-legged creature pacing the field. Ruby blinked as another breeze took hold of the branches and the leaves sang out their papery melody. When she opened her eyes next, the horse had come to stand in the open space.
It had found them there, and it watched.
“Oh?” The realtor—Cheryl was her name—looked between the young couple, those darkly shadowed eyes rapid-firing back and forth. “No plans to start one of your own, then?”
“None for us,” Jake answered, and put a thoughtful hand on the small of Ruby’s back. Taking the bullet, Ruby thought.
“Oh, now, a couple as photogenic as you! You’ll change your mind, believe me. And the world will certainly be prettier for it.”
Cheryl looked slyly to each of their faces, on the brink of elbowing them chummily.
“Of course then I’d have to raise them,” Ruby chided. “And then let’s see how your theory holds up.”
Cheryl casually fanned the air, a gesture of dismissal to their naivety. “Well, you’re just kids yourselves. Still plenty of time. Remind me again—I know you’re moving out here for work, Mr. Holloway. What is it you do, Ruby?”
Because I don’t want children, that means I need to explain my purpose in life? Ruby thought bitterly.
“I write books.”
“Oh!” Cheryl appeared genuinely shocked, and she looked Ruby up and down as if she were a creature she’d never known existed. “Really? You’re a writer? Are you published?”
Ruby nodded. “Many times.”
“What do you write?”
“Romance,” Ruby said, grinning. “The dirty kind.”
She watched the realtor carefully then, trying to detect discomfort, an avoidance to meet Ruby’s gaze, but to Ruby’s great surprise Cheryl didn’t appear at all offended. In fact, she seemed downright impressed.
“Well!” Cheryl put a hand to her heart, head cocked curiously, taking Ruby in for the first time a second time. “That is just marvelous. You make money doing that, then?”
“Enough to support the both of us while I made a career change,” Jake interrupted. His hand was still on Ruby’s back.
Cheryl regarded them both fondly, eyes darting curiously.
“Your generation never ceases to amaze me…” Her hand on her chest found the hummingbird-shaped necklace hanging there and she played with it absentmindedly while she continued to stare, wondering things Ruby had no interest in knowing. “So a family is really out of the question? Truly?”
Ruby had to stifle a mean-spirited laugh that abruptly rose to the back of her throat. There were a million ways she might have told this woman—this Cheryl—about how none of that was any of her damn business in the first place. But the evening was only just creeping up on them and there were still a handful of houses left to view. She’d refrain from souring the rest.
“Truly.”
***
Ruby chose to sit in the backseat of Cheryl’s car on their way to the next property, Jake in the passenger seat. Several times Ruby sensed eyes on her and found the nosy realtor watching through the rearview mirror. Each time their gazes met, the realtor’s watching eyes squinted with a smile Ruby couldn’t see.
“Sorry,” Cheryl said. “I don’t mean to keep staring. It’s just…” She paused and Ruby’s hands balled themselves into fists in her lap, bracing. “Has anyone ever told you, you look like a young Ingrid Bergman?”
Jake turned in his seat to look at Ruby, brow furrowed. Ruby gave him the same look.
“I don’t know who that is,” Ruby said.
Cheryl laughed heartily. “Oh! I keep forgetting. It’s not often these days I’m showing houses to couples as young as yourselves. Remind me your ages again?”
“Twenty-five,” both Ruby and Jake answered.
“Well, anyway…” Cheryl laughed again. “Ingrid Bergman. Look her up. Either of you watch movies? Casablanca? No?”
Ruby and Jake exchanged yet another private glance.
“I know it’s famous,” Jake said. “Never seen it, though.”
Cheryl’s eyes found Ruby again in the rearview mirror, and now she studied her openly with no scruples, and Ruby fidgeted uncomfortably.
“She was beautiful,” Cheryl said. “That’s all you need to know.”
***
A comfortable silence had fallen over the car in their traveling, until the length of the silence reminded Ruby that it was strange they hadn’t reached their destination yet. Then Cheryl spoke up at last and explained the winding, prolonged nature of their journey.
“You probably noticed by now we’ve taken a bit of a detour,” she said. “There’s another house I want to show you both. I hope it’s all right. I have a good feeling about it.”
Ruby picked up the small stack of paper sitting in the backseat beside her—printouts of the listings they’d be visiting, provided by Cheryl at the start of their evening. Ruby shuffled through them carefully.
“It’s not one of these?”
“No. It isn’t one I’d planned showing you tonight.”
“Oh. All right…”
“See, I’d put together a list of houses in areas I thought suitable for a young couple such as yourselves.” Cheryl laughed again, a mechanism she must have learned that could pardon her of any blame or fault no matter the situation. Such a character, that Cheryl! “But I know now I made assumptions I shouldn’t have.”
They were driving along the suburb’s outskirts—houses to their left, and down a slight slope from the road’s shoulder on their right an old, barbed-wire fence with an expanse of field beyond it, a pasture filled with wild grass and a scattering of tall, unruly cottonwoods. Ruby watched through her window, searching the pasture for cattle, or perhaps even--
“Nearly there,” Cheryl said. “Just around the corner here.”
She pulled the wheel hand over hand as they turned onto a different street. The sign read: HARWICK LN. Only it wasn’t really a street or a lane, Ruby discovered. They entered into a cozy, spoon-shaped cul-de-sac, bordered by six houses total: four properties circling the head of the spoon, and two properties on either corner of the cul-de-sac’s narrow entrance—the stubby spoon handle. They were each in the same general style, with varying hues of clapboard siding. Cheryl followed the curve of the cul-de-sac until they arrived at the rearmost house on the cul-de-sac’s righthand side. A light blue rambler. As she pulled into the driveway, Ruby searched the yard for a sign and saw none.
“I don’t see a for-sale sign,” she said.
Cheryl parked and killed the engine, then looked toward the yard open-mouthed as if she didn’t know the first thing about that.
“Huh, that’s curious,” she said. “I’ll have to replace it.”
“I’m assuming the previous owners are gone,” Jake said. “Since we’re dropping by unannounced like this.”
“Right. No one’s in this house currently.” Cheryl unbuckled. Opening her door, she turned to them and said, “A quick tour?”
***
“It’s a little smaller, at least,” Ruby said as they entered the kitchen. She admired the clean, white-granite countertops. She leaned over the kitchen sink and peered through the window there, looking into the backyard. “Oh, those same cottonwoods along the back, and that barbed-wire fence…”
“Yes!” Cheryl brushed against Ruby as she leaned beside her, looking out. “You might have noticed the ranch we passed on our way here. All that property runs along the back here. It’s very quiet without neighbors behind you. Well, unless you count the horses.”
“Horses?” Jake’s hand found Ruby’s waist as he came to stand behind her at the sink, looking through the window over her shoulder. “You love horses.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t say I love them. I just grew up with them, is all.”
“Is that so?” Cheryl said. “Did you grow up on a ranch?”
“Kind of. I mean, it was only horses. My mom had a real passion for them.”
Cheryl wished to show them the backyard, so they stepped out and strolled across the lawn. It was more private than the last house they were shown, bordered on both sides by tall wooden fencing that ran to the yard’s end. The very rear of the yard, however, was not fenced in, unless you counted the low, barbed-wire fence separating the ranch’s property. A small toolshed stood in the far corner near the barbed-wire fence on the lefthand side. Jake pointed to it.
“That’s where we’ll build the secret underground weapons bunker.”
Ruby smiled, brow raised. “Mhmm.” She took a deep breath and admired the tops of the trees, swaying as the sky behind them was beginning to turn. “It’s peaceful, I’ll give it that.”
“Best of all,” Cheryl said, “the neighbors here are all a bit older. No children. There is one younger couple, I believe. The Porters. But they’re a bit like you. Modern, you know. Career driven. They only recently moved in themselves.”
“Did you sell them their house?” Ruby asked.
“I did. I’m actually friends with your neighbors. These ones…” She pointed to the yard left of them. “So I can at least personally assure you they’re very friendly.”
“Not too friendly, I hope,” Ruby said jokingly.
“Ruby’s the kind of neighbor who likes to keep things to a ‘courteous wave’ basis,” Jake said.
“I’m just not fond of small talk,” Ruby added.
Cheryl nodded, smiling to some private thought while she looked at Ruby in such a way that Ruby became uncomfortable and turned away, looking again to the trees gently brushing the sky.
“I understand,” Cheryl said. She clapped her hands together with a hollow smack. “Well, I’ll let you two walk around some more. Talk amongst yourselves. I need to make a quick phone call, if that’s all right. I’ll be out front in the meantime if you have any questions.”
Cheryl left them alone in the backyard. Ruby continued to look up at the sky above the trees, turning bright with sunset as the sun abandoned them. Jake stood behind her and put his hands on either of her shoulders, massaging.
“What do you think of this place?”
“It seems nice,” Ruby said. She spoke vaguely, sighing deeply. “It’s still a little big, I think.”
“Big? It’s the smallest house on the street. The others are all two-story.” Jake leaned against her, his face beside hers, and spoke into her ear. “And did you hear? No children…”
He kissed Ruby’s ear gently so as not to deafen her. Then he stepped back and took her hand in his. He started deeper into the yard, toward the trees and the barbed-wire fence and the toolshed.
“I wonder…” he said, and looked over his shoulder at Ruby with a sly glint in his eye.
“Oh, god. What are you up to?”
He led them toward the toolshed, around it. He cast an alert glance toward the back of the house before they slipped around the corner and stood in the shade between the toolshed and the trees beyond the barbed-wire fence. He pushed Ruby delicately against the shed, his hands moving about her waist.
“I take it you…” Ruby paused as he kissed her, panting. “…really like the house.”
“I love it,” he breathed.
He tucked his face into the nook of her neck and shoulder as his hands climbed from her hips, her waist, up to her breasts, then down again.
With her chin rested over Jake’s shoulder, Ruby eyed the trees, the gaps between them and their branches. The pasture of wild grass through those gaps rippled and waved with the same breeze that moved in the treetops over their heads. That peaceful, warm quiet was all around them and loud. The leaves rustled, chattering a secret language Ruby only barely understood.
As Jake’s hand slipped against her, underneath the waist of her jeans, and cupped her between her legs, Ruby closed her eyes and rested her head back against the slivery toolshed. He groped her, kissed the side of her neck. She opened her eyes a little and glimpsed the dying sunlight through the branches overhead. Warm gold.
She closed her eyes once more and imagined glowing dew on a woman’s face. The sound of contagious laughter from a pink-lipped mouth. A two-piece bathing suit. The hand inside her jeans cupped more firmly, fingers working, and Ruby breathed in sharply.
Her eyes opened into pleasant slits and looked to the spaces between the trees. There was movement. A four-legged creature pacing the field. Ruby blinked as another breeze took hold of the branches and the leaves sang out their papery melody. When she opened her eyes next, the horse had come to stand in the open space.
It had found them there, and it watched.